Amasty is a Premier Magento Extension Builder. Having started to evolve right after Magento was born, the company has developed 220+ extensions. While being on the market of Magento extensions [for 9+ years], Amasty continuously keeps pace with technological developments and monitors e-commerce trends. From this post, you can learn about a few of the latest e-retail tendencies, which have already come to life.

Do you remember the first time you made your online purchase?

At the time of online retail emergence, merchants took all measures to persuade us of our personal information safeness. And more recently an average user relied on one good old password used for multiple needs. However, the old days are dead and gone. Launching an online store today is a piece of cake. Everything you need is to choose an open-source platform, say Magento CE or PrestaShop, and adjust it to your business needs.

Make no mistake, though — this is the tip of the iceberg. Security is what of a high importance among those business strategic-making tasks. Without effective security measures, you are risking to lose income and brand reliability.

How Are Common Customer Loyalty And Security?

In 2017 we saw the FDP (fraud detection and prevention) market worldwide was worth 16.6 billion U.S. dollars. Among other areas, the fraud detection and prevention tools are applied in:

Today they highlight two bigger e-commerce fraud types: account takeover, and identity theft (with all their subtypes). No longer, as last year online retailers came up with Shadow Brokers’ activities, WannaCry, Petya, GoldenEye ransomware, Vault 7, Cloudbleed, Aadhaar-scam with ICICI Bank, to name but a few. Moreover, in line with the 2017 Global Fraud Index research, online retailers lost about $3.3 billion dollars only due to account takeover where $57.8 billion is the value of potential fraud faced by more than 5,000 e-commerce merchants in North America, Asia, and Europe.

Thus, this growth in FDP solutions demand stems from (a) a greater number of online fraudulence, (b) more sophisticated forms of attacks and, in this, (c) cases of huge financial loss and (d) fear of brand reputation loss. As a result, today we see users are more eager to shop in large online stores with global brand awareness and high reliability.

Why Apply the Individual Approach?

The Internet security realities we live in are affecting almost any online store process. And the most baffling processes are the checkout and order processing.

And here are a few aspects of why the processes are sidetracking numerous ‘well-seasoned’ stores and newbies of the sphere:

#1. Users are more likely to create a fake account on a webstore rather than run a real-life email and credentials.

#2. With the distribution of cheap VPN services and public proxies, non-recurrent buyers are more likely to place an order from a fake IP address, which can be used for malicious intentions.

#3. We see a further difficulty of managing a never-ending list of fraudulent customers’ and their order history, which is particularly true for growing e-stores;

#4. You may confront a staff shortage, which can result in the fact that the web server logs are not timely reviewed to disclose errors and suspicious activities.

Right, what’s the solution?

The decision lies in the necessity of individual approach application. Assuming you are running your online store on Magento 2, then you know the native settings don’t allow for proper customer groups segmentation. But the diversified approach is what can increase not only your customer loyalty but also the store security level.

We gathered the main cases where customers segmentation can help to build strong loyalty and enhance your store security level:

Case #1 Your Selling Strategy Differentiation:

Big Points for Customer Loyalty

What can be better than a unique opportunity?

Since you were young…you were told that there was the only person in the world like you.

Coming back to the strategy, both merchants and customers make a profit from ‘Add to wish list’, and ‘Add to compare’ features. A well-tailored wishlist is a great opportunity to boost sales and bring more attention of newcomers.

However, by offering the opportunity for a special group of customers, you make them privileged, which is bound to arrest the attention. Thus, you can offer unique opportunities to regular buyers, which raises their loyalty, and motivates the unregistered visitors to create an account on your website.

Big Points for Security

Random visitors prefer creating fake accounts to order a thing they liked and never come back.

Where is the guarantee that the visitor doesn’t intend to work on a fraudulent operation?

Of course, there’s none, which poses a risk to your income. Besides, the fake accounts clutter up your client’s database and waste the server resources. This can lead to slowing the catalog search and deter regular buyers.

Case #2 Your Products Sorting Speed-Up:

Big Points for Customer Loyalty

A webstore navigation is one of the decisive factors that influence customer loyalty. The sooner a customer will find the desired product, the higher the probability he’ll make a purchase and return to your store again.

Though, providing equal possibilities to your visitors can lead to servers overload and, hence, low shopping cart conversion rate in the long term. To speed up the search you can divide your clients into groups and display different categories for non-registered and regular buyers, as well as create group price display rules. For instance, hide products price for random visitors, thereby, motivating them to create an account in your store or click the ‘call for price’ button.

Big Points for Security

How many times have you seen your child watching adult content on the Internet? Surely, you don’t want to deter your customers’ by making 18+ information open for their children. And though the problem indirectly concerns online security, customer groups can solve the problem of online children safeness: you can simply open the age restrictive categories for definite groups after achieving their consent.

This will clearly show your care of the clients, raise customer loyalty and online children’s safety.

To manage the groups correctly, you need to create unique or doubling (as for the wholesale group) rules for each of them. When you have sufficient staff resources, let’s say there are four admin users, you can divide the job between them and, thus, reduce the possibility of human-factor mistakes.

This will expedite your orders management and have a positive impact on customer loyalty.

Big Points for Security

In keeping with the ‘legend’ we described above, each of the four admin users can manage a fewer number of customers. This will help you reduce the time spent on manual anti-fraud order history review and invest it in more effective solutions for your store security.

Let’s Get It Straight

While taking steps to ensure customers in reliability and security of your online store you can apply as many ideas as possible. (In some cases, only a/b testing approach can help you understand what of the options work better).

The fact that each webstore is oriented towards its targeted audience assumes that all the applied methods should be tooled for specific needs. And here comes customers segmentation.

hide product page buttons or even categories with adult content from children;

divide the work on manual order review between several admin users to reduce risks of the key fraudulent indications being overlooked.

It isn’t going to solve all the security problems for your e-commerce store. To secure an e-commerce site, you need to implement fraud detection and prevention tools, as well as learn how to lower the probability of fraud incidents using security patches and platform’s critical vulnerabilities.

Together with all the anti-fraud tools you’ve already implemented, the individual approach applied for different customer groups can help you (1) bring the system to your clients’ database, (2) simplify the manual order review with the view to fraudulent activities and (3) increase customer loyalty.